Character

Mike van Diem's Character (Karakter) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1998, the first Dutch film to do so since Fons Rademakers's The Assault in 1986. The film was van Diem's debut feature, adapted from the 1938 Dutch literary classic by F. Bordewijk, a novel widely considered one of the foundational works of Dutch interwar realism, and one that Rademakers had himself once attempted unsuccessfully to film.

1920s Rotterdam. Jacob Willem Katadreuffe (Fedja van Huêt), the ambitious illegitimate son of an exhausted housekeeper, attempts to train as a lawyer in the city's commercial-trade environment under the shadow of Arend Barend Dreverhaven (Jan Decleir, in a performance of slow-burning menace), a feared Rotterdam bailiff who happens to be Katadreuffe's biological father, a parentage Dreverhaven has never permitted his son to acknowledge. The film moves between the Rotterdam docks, the bourgeois law offices, and the deepening psychological stakes between father and son.

Rogier Stoffers's photography of the city's industrial harbour and Theo Loevendie's score establish the film's distinctive interwar register. The Oscar made van Diem only the second Dutch director to take the Best Foreign Language Film prize, after Marleen Gorris with Antonia's Line two years earlier, back-to-back wins for a national cinema that had never previously been nominated in the category. Bordewijk's source novel, long a fixture of Dutch school curricula, found its definitive screen treatment here. Decleir's performance is one for the long memory of European-cinema acting.